What's Mine's Mine — Complete

by George MacDonald

For who can know anything except on the supposition of its remaining the same? and the greatest change of all, next to being born again, is beginning to love. The very faculty of loving had been hitherto repressed in the soul of Christina—by poor education, by low family and social influences, by familiarity with the worship of riches, by vanity, and consequent hunger after the attentions of men; but now at length she was in love.

At breakfast, though she was silent, she looked so well that her mother complimented her on her loveliness. Had she been more of a mother, she might have seen cause for anxiety in this fresh bourgeoning of her beauty.

CHAPTER XV.

LOVE ALLODIAL.

While the chief went on in his humble way, enjoying life and his lowly position; seeming, in the society of his brother, to walk the outer courts of heaven; and, unsuspicious of the fact, growing more and more in love with the ill educated, but simple, open, and wise Mercy, a trouble was gathering for him of which he had no presentiment. We have to be delivered from the evils of which we are unaware as well as from those we hate; and the chief had to be set free from his unconscious worship of Mammon. He did not worship Mammon by yielding homage to riches; he did not make a man's money his pedestal; had he been himself a millionaire, he would not have connived at being therefore held in honour; but, ever consciously aware of the deteriorating condition of the country, and pitifully regarding the hundred and fifty souls who yet looked to him as their head, often turning it over in his mind how to shepherd them should things come to a crisis, his abiding, ever-recurring comfort was the money from the last sale of the property, accumulating ever since, and now to be his in a very few years: he always thought, I say, first of this money and not first of God. He imagined it an inexhaustible force, a power with which for his clan he could work wonders. It is the common human mistake to think of money as a force and not as a mere tool. But he never thought of it otherwise than as belonging to the clan; never imagined the least liberty to use it save in the direct service of his people. And all the time, the very shadow of this money was disappearing from the face of the earth!

It had scarcely been deposited where the old laird judged it as safe as in the Bank of England, when schemes and speculations were initiated by the intrusted company which brought into jeopardy everything it held, and things had been going from bad to worse ever since. Nothing of this was yet known, for the directors had from the first carefully muffled up the truth, avoiding the least economy lest it should be interpreted as hinting at any need of prudence; living in false show with the very money they were thus lying away, warming and banqueting their innocent neighbours with fuel and wine stolen from their own cellars; and working worse wrong and more misery under the robe of imputed righteousness, that is, respectability, than could a little army of burglars. Unawares to a trusting multitude, the vacant eyes of loss were drawing near to stare them out of hope and comfort; and annihilation had long closed in upon the fund which the chief regarded as the sheet-anchor of his clan: he trusted in Mammon, and Mammon had played him one of his rogue's-tricks. The most degrading wrong to ourselves, and the worst eventual wrong to others, is to trust in any thing or person but the living God: it was an evil thing from which the chief had sore need to be delivered. Even those who help us we must regard as the loving hands of the great heart of the universe, else we do God wrong, and will come to do them wrong also.

And there was more yet of what we call mischief brewing in another quarter to like hurt.

Mr. Peregrine Palmer was not now so rich a man as when he bought his highland property; also he was involved in affairs of doubtful result. It was natural, therefore, that he should begin to think of the said property not merely as an ornament of life, but as something to fall back upon. He feared nothing, however, more unpleasant than a temporary embarrassment. Had not his family been in the front for three generations! Had he not a vested right in success! Had he not a claim for the desire of his heart on whatever power it was that he pictured to himself as throned in the heavens! It never came into his head that, seeing there were now daughters in the family, it might be worth the while of that Power to make a poor man of him for their sakes; or that neither he, his predecessors, nor his sons, had ever come near enough to anything human to be fit for having their pleasures taken from them. But what I have to do with is the new aspect his Scotch acres now put on: he must see to making the best of them! and that best would be a deer-forest! He and his next neighbour might together effect something worth doing! Therefore all crofters or villagers likely to trespass must be got rid of—and first and foremost the shepherds, for they had endless opportunities of helping themselves to a deer. Where there were sheep there must be shepherds: they would make a clearance of both! The neighbour referred to, a certain Mr. Brander, who had made his money by sharp dealing in connection with a great Russian railway, and whom Mr. Peregrine Palmer knew before in London, had enlightened him on many things, and amongst others on the shepherds' passion for deer-stalking. Being in the company of the deer, he said, the whole day, and the whole year through, they were thoroughly acquainted with their habits, and were altogether too much both for the deer and for their owners. A shepherd would take the barrel of his gun from the stock, and thrust it down his back, or put it in a hollow crook, and so convey it to the vicinity of some spot frequented by a particular animal, to lie hidden there for his opportunity. In the hills it was impossible to tell with certainty whence came the sound of a shot; and no rascal of them would give information concerning another! In short, there was no protecting the deer without uprooting and expelling the peasantry!

The village of the Clanruadh was on Mr. Brander's land, and was dependent in part on the produce of small pieces of ground, the cultivators of which were mostly men with other employment as well. Some made shoes of the hides, others cloth and clothes of the wool of the country. Some were hinds on neighbouring farms, but most were shepherds, for there was now very little tillage. Almost all the land formerly cultivated had been given up to grass and sheep, and not a little of it was steadily returning to that state of nature from which it had been reclaimed, producing heather, ling, blueberries, cnowperts, and cranberries. The hamlet was too far from the sea for much fishing, but some of its inhabitants would join relatives on the coast and go fishing with them, when there was nothing else to be done. But many of those who looked to the sea for help had lately come through a hard time, in which they would have died but for the sea-weed and shellfish the shore afforded them; yet such was their spirit of independence that a commission appointed to inquire into their necessity, found scarcely one willing to acknowledge any want: such was the class of men and women now doomed, at the will of two common-minded, greedy men, to expulsion from the houses and land they had held for generations, and loved with a love unintelligible to their mean-souled oppressors.

Ian, having himself learned the lesson that, so long as a man is dependent on anything earthly, he is not a free man, was very desirous to have his brother free also. He could not be satisfied to leave the matter where, on their way home that night from THE TOMB, as they called their cave-house, their talk had left it. Alister's love of the material world, of the soil of his ancestral acres, was, Ian plainly saw, not yet one with the meaning and will of God: he was not yet content that the home of his fathers should fare as the father of fathers pleased. He was therefore on the outlook for the right opportunity of having another talk with him on the subject.